The culture war fight to rename woking | thearticle

There is a gathering, and very significant, storm growing on social media to rename the town of Woking, and to change its name back to its Anglo-Saxon form of _Wohingas_. Superficially, this

battle has erupted because the town’s name has the term “Woke” in it. More significantly, however, the row points to greater themes at play within Western society, the media and the culture

wars. April is the cruellest month and on such a significant day as today, it would be foolish indeed to ignore the threat faced by Woking. When you look up the cultural contribution of

Woking, it packs a surprisingly large punch for a town which is a byword for the London commuter belt. For example, H.G. Wells set Horsell Common in Woking for the Martians’ first landing in

_War of the Worlds_. Now cultural fact is stranger than science fiction. Arthur Conan Doyle lands Sherlock Holmes in the town for an investigation in one of his short stories. More recently

Woking was compared to “Standing in the kitchen wondering what you came in here for” by Douglas Adams in_ The Deeper Meaning of Liff_.  In February 1982 _The Jam_ reached number 1 in the

charts by writing _A Town Called Malice_ about Woking.  A town called malice aforethought, indeed. So perhaps Woking is overdue a bit of the limelight. Now, though, it is caught in the glare

of cultural conflagration. Dig a bit deeper into the political make-up of Woking and the place turns out to be fertile ground for a culture war. The town has a Liberal Democrat Mayor, but a

Conservative MP. The Torys have 20 seats in the council while the Liberals have 18. In the last General Election, the long-standing Conservative MP was returned to Westminster, but lost 5.2

percent of his vote while the Liberal Democrat candidate increased vote by a staggering 13.2 percent. The Tories need culture wars in places like Woking to hold onto power in the Southeast,

while pork-barrelling money into the Red Wall. These sorts of conflicts don’t do the Lib Dems any harm either; getting them much-needed attention and manufactured relevance for the

community they should be serving. To really understand how Woking could be caught up in a wave of Anglo-Saxon reactionary rage, look no further than the Brexit referendum of 2016.

Traditionally the town was the very definition of true blue, but voted overwhelmingly to remain in the European Union (51.2 percent). Up until the Brexit referendum this was a town which

oozed middle class stability, but is now ripping itself apart over what it should call itself. The Brexit debate polarised everything it touched. To understand this, we must get to grips

with the figure of Nigel Farage, who looms so large in the leafy suburbs such as Woking. His personality, more than anyone else in modern political culture, polarised every tacit of British

life. Brexit was his Pandora’s Box, which lit the tinder chest of culture wars, creating an earthquake to shake the very foundations of what it is to live in a town like Woking. From this

spouted the fountainhead of polarisation to create the divided society we live in today. For Brexit, read controversy over trans, BLM, lockdown, anti-vaxers, the BBC, climate change or

indeed the woking classes. Society is now so divided that we can’t even agree on names of the places we live in. The Woking controversy is evidence of a collective collapse in Western

culture. No wonder Putin is so emboldened. Just imagine what his trolls and bots could do with this war of the worlds: Woking versus Wohingas. All of this is deeply problematic and goes to

the root of who we are and where we want to go. Unless we can rely on what our communities call themselves, how can we avoid a return to Anglo-Saxon attitudes? Not much can be expected from

our political overlords. Boris “the Deceiver” Johnson and Sir Keir “Captain Hindsight” Starmer are hardly the people to take us forward, but make us look back into an abyss of culture wars

constructed for their own ends. With such medieval jesters and knights of the realm in charge, what hope for Woking? As Shakespeare has his fool, Feste, tell Malvolio in _Twelfth Night_:

“Then you are mad indeed, if you are no better in your wits than a fool.” A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an

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